My weekend

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Sparky617

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Cary NC
So Saturday I do a bike ride and put one of the bikes away in the basement next to the water heater. Life is good. I decide to do some yard work, cut the grass, trim some bushes the usual homeowner stuff. After cutting the grass I go back by the water heater to get my rake to clean up the clippings from the bushes and I have water on the floor. A quick check confirms a slow drip out of the case of the water heater. Joy!

Being Saturday afternoon, Ferguson is closed. So I check at Lowes.com and they don't have a direct vent gas water heater in stock, they can have it by September 3rd. I'm thinking 2 weeks of dripping water out of this thing is a bit long. Luckily, in addition to Lowe's we have a number of big Oranges in town. The Cary store has one, at least according to the website. So we head over to HD Saturday night to pick up the one in stock. Head to the water heater aisle and in the shelf space is a regular 50-gallon gas water heater. The employee looking at the shelf label says, there is your water heater. Me, looking at the picture on the box, and the SKU on the box noted that the box SKU and the shelf SKU don't match. Another more helpful employee comes along and we search the entire aisle and the one that is inventory isn't in the store. He helpfully checks the Apex store and they have 3! in stock. He has them pull it down and put in on a cart for me to pickup that evening. We head on over and it was waiting as advertised. I measure it and it will fit in the Edge with the passenger seat moved forward. Success!

We head home and after church on Sunday, I set to install the new one. The new one has a different exhaust design than the one I installed 8 years ago, but the same as the original in the house. So I plumb it up, with only one visit to the Lowe's store conveniently located 2 miles from my house. I needed new dielectric couplings as one would not come off the old water heater. I go to install the vent, only to discover I'm too far from the wall. Back to Lowe's for more parts, and while I'm at it I decide to replace the gate valve with a ball valve on the cold water side.

Four home improvement store visits and 5 hours and we're back in hot water. Yeah me! Now if I can just stop that stupid leak in my bathroom sink.
 
Good job, you're doing better than me. If I change the washer in a garden hose its 3 trips to the store, then another to take back all the stuff I thought I needed and didn't...
 
I didn't deploy the buy more and take back strategy. I figured I'd have to do at least one visit to Lowe's once I got the old one out and the new one set in place. I wasn't sure how things were going to line up. They lined up surprisingly well, The final gas connections are in the black threaded pipe, but the supply is flexible stainless steel, so that helped a lot. I should have just picked up the dielectric couplings at HD, but Lowe's is so close that I figured I was going to have to make a run anyway.

Question though. This is in a yet unfinished basement. The old one didn't have a pan, but I added one just in case. I'm right at the outside wall of the house, but the water heater is sitting on the slab, well with the pan in between. Trying to figure out how to drain the pan with very little gravitational help. Thoughts are: drill into the slab and drain it into the gravel below the slab. Option 2, cut through the sill plate (2x8 PT) and have it drain to daylight outside (walk out basement, this area is above grade). A contractor friend suggested a backup condensate pump for an AC pan, not the reservoir type. I didn't see any at Lowes, not a lot of room for one in the pan. I haven't looked online yet. If I went with the drain it through the slab, there is plastic sheeting under the gravel under the slab. I'm thinking there will never be much water anyway, though, with a pan, the leak could go on a bit longer before it gets noticed. I didn't want to set the unit up on blocks to make it work with gravity as that would have thrown the plumbing connections off and the ready cut wall in the exterior of my house.

Thoughts? I figure I have a few years to solve this as the water heater shouldn't leak for 8-10 years.
 
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